John Seigenthaler, Editor and Aide to Politicians, Dies at 86

In October 1954, a man called The Nashville Tennessean and said he was going to jump to his death from a bridge high above the Cumberland River. “Send a reporter and a photographer if you want a story,” he said.

A 27-year-old reporter, John Seigenthaler, climbed out to talk to the man and tucked his leg around the rusty grillwork. After about 40 minutes of an interview that blended questions with pleas to reconsider, Mr. Seigenthaler lunged, grabbing the man by the collar and holding him until the police could drag both men to safety.

The man he rescued said, “I’ll never forgive you.” Mr. Seigenthaler continued to pursue his muscular approach to journalism as a crusading newspaper editor and publisher in Nashville and as the founding editorial director of USA Today. He worked for his friend Robert F. Kennedy in the Justice Department and in his presidential campaign in 1968. And at an age when many people consider retirement, he started a new career, founding the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University and in Washington.

He died on Friday at his home in Nashville at 86. The cause was complications of colon cancer, said his son, John M. Seigenthaler, a prime-time news anchor at Al Jazeera America.

Mr. Seigenthaler’s career took him from journalism to politics and back again. He worked on John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1960 and joined the Justice Department the next year. That May, as a representative of Robert Kennedy, the attorney general, Mr. Seigenthaler was beaten when a mob attacked a busload of Freedom Riders in Montgomery, Ala. He was hit on the head with a lead pipe and suffered a concussion while trying to protect a young woman. John Lewis, now a member of Congress from Georgia, was among the Freedom Riders beaten that day.

After a year at the Justice Department, he was offered the job of editor at The Tennessean and returned to Nashville, beginning a 29-year tenure. He sent a reporter under cover to report on the Ku Klux Klan and hounded the union boss Jimmy Hoffa. When a Tennessean copy editor, Jacque Srouji, was revealed to be an F.B.I. informant, he fired her.

When he subsequently discovered that the F.B.I. was keeping a file on him, he demanded that it be turned over to him and pledged to run it in the newspaper. After a year, he received a heavily redacted copy; it mentioned “allegations of Seigenthaler having illicit relations with young girls.” Mr. Seigenthaler ran it, in a first-person article that he called “the most difficult assignment I have undertaken.”

The statement was slanderous and untrue, he wrote, adding that his wife was “outraged” by the file — “outraged at the F.B.I. and not at me, I am happy to report.”

Justice Department officials apologized to him.

“He was not always the most popular guy in town,” said his son, who recalled picking up the phone on a weekend morning in his teenage years to hear a torrent of racist obscenity from a woman who had been outraged by a civil rights editorial his father had written. Occasionally, he said, the police would provide protection at the house in response to death threats. “There was always some potential that some nut would do something,” Mr. Seigenthaler recalled. “But he didn’t change his life. He kept saying what he thought.”

At The Tennessean, the elder Mr. Seigenthaler worked with reporters who went on to fame, including David Halberstam and Albert Gore Jr., who proved an able investigative reporter and who, by 1976, was considering following his father’s path into politics. (Albert Gore Sr. had been a senator from Tennessee.)

One day in February of that year, Mr. Seigenthaler called Mr. Gore at home to tell him that a Tennessee congressman, Joe L. Evins, had decided to retire, adding, “You know what I think.”

Mr. Gore began his political career, winning Mr. Evins’s seat.

Mr. Seigenthaler continued to delve into hard questions of free speech late in his career. In 2005, he wrote a column for USA Today about anonymous alterations to the Wikipedia article about him that said he had been involved in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy — preposterous accusations but especially hurtful, considering his long friendship with the Kennedy family. His protest led Wikipedia, a volunteer-driven online encyclopedia, to adopt verification standards.

John Lawrence Seigenthaler Jr. was born in Nashville on July 27, 1927. His father, a roofer, and his mother, the former Mary Brew, had eight children in all. His father died when John Jr. was 17. He attended Peabody College in Nashville, now part of Vanderbilt University, but did not graduate. He enlisted in the Army Air Forces and achieved the rank of sergeant.

He married Dolores Watson, a big-band singer in Nashville, in 1955. She and his son survive him, along with a grandson; three sisters, Evalyne Seigenthaler Pace, Alice Seigenthaler Valiquette and Joan Seigenthaler Miller; and a brother, William Robert Seigenthaler.

This year, the bridge over the Cumberland where Mr. Seigenthaler rescued the man, which had been converted to pedestrian use, was renamed in his honor.

Correction:

An obituary on Saturday about the newspaper editor and political aide John Seigenthaler misstated the location of the district represented by Representative Joe L. Evins, whose retirement led Mr. Seigenthaler to urge Al Gore to run for Congress. It was near Nashville; it did not include Nashville.

Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D8 of the New York edition with the headline: John Seigenthaler, 86, Crusading Editor. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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